Donald Sterling and Global Warming

What’s a Tampa sports addict to do? My Rays are in free fall. And the commentary on the NBA Playoffs is all Donald Sterling all the time. So I guess I’ll have to switch over to the hockey, eh? Aggravated battery on skates.

Sports writers and sports talking heads, insufficiently diverted by the games they're assigned to cover, and envious of the moral preening their news-side colleagues can regularly engage in, seem to be delighted to be able to anguish about what an 80-year old billionaire said to his trophy girl friend about whom she should hang out with. It gives them a chance to wring their hands about racism in America, and to show how pure their hearts are on the matter. Much more elevating than nattering on about LeBron James’ pull-up jumper.

I guess there’s a point in all this somewhere. Benighted racial statements are not helpful, and they diminish us. Though nuanced ones — such as Henry Aaron calling Republicans ku-kluxers, John Kerry saying Israel runs an apartheid state, and Al Sharpton saying, well, whatever he’s saying today — seem to be fine among the cognoscenti. Sterling, whose very existence I (and most of the rest of the known universe) was unaware of until his silly remarks elevated him from the obscurity he deserves to page one, seems a dotty old fellow and a bit unreconstructed. But he’s hardly Bull Connor. Heck, he’s not even Robert Byrd in that honored Democrat’s KKK days. And did anyone mention those hoary American values of freedom of expression and freedom of association?

I’m not the first to notice this, of course. But the current resident of 1600, and the picadors in his administration, will slap down the race card off the bottom of the deck faster than any dealer in Las Vegas. This shouldn’t surprise us. The Left couldn’t survive an election cycle without the charge of racism. They have a bigger vested interest in a perceived racist America than a rooster has in sunrise. Yes, Virginia, this pack is indeed headed up by the guy who repeatedly said when running in 2008 — “There is no white America. There is no black America. There is just a United States of America.”

The latest laugher from the faux racism front comes courtesy of recent remarks by Gina McCarthy, Obama’s chief of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. While addressing an outfit called the Hip-Hop Caucus, she claimed that pollution is racist. You read that right — pollution. As Dave Barry has taught us to say, I'm not making this up.

“Pollution is holding back millions of African-Americans fighting for middle class security,” McCarthy told this non-profit group that claims to educate and engage young people in policy making. “Environmental justice is social justice.” She claimed that minorities have been “overburdened by pollution and environmental health hazards for far too long.”

McCarthy said we “have a moral obligation to act now.” She wasn’t explicit on what actions she thinks we need to take, nor did she make clear how unclean water and unclean air manage to inflict minorities while bypassing white folks. But hey, what’s the charm in being a Leftist if you have to be coherent?

Of course all of this makes sense only if it’s understood as a cynical attempt by Leftists to excite the Democratic Party base. And they can expect plenty of help in this from the left-stream media, from many of the same folks hyper-ventilating about Sterling this week. La McCarthy’s remarks show that there is no limit on what can be construed as racism. On this subject, the left media has no BS immune system at all. Anything, no matter how preposterous, can be asserted as evidence of racism and accepted in Big Media Land. In fact, my sources in the New York Times newsroom tell me that soon that lefty-newsletter will carry the headline: “Donald Sterling Causes Climate Change.”

My country, contrary to what many on the Left would have you believe, has not become evil. But on some days it can appear to be awfully damned silly. We ran Jim Crow out of town decades ago. Not as soon as we should have, but the evil b-----d is gone. And there aren’t enough dotty old duffers like Donald Sterling to get him back (even if that’s what Sterling would like to see, and it’s not clear that it is). So why don’t we just take a couple of deep breaths and move on. I really don’t care for hockey that much.

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